Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Jeremy Sanders reported that using cstat with background generated a NaN fit statistic value when running on an x86_64. Turned out to be a function that was not defined as double precision in the calling routine. Fixed as 11.3.2o.

The HXD consists of two parts - the PIN and GSO. We have a separate event file for each part with the difference in keywords being DETNAM='WELL_PIN' for the former and WELL_GSO for the latter. The PIN uses PI_PIN for spectra and the GSO PI_SLOW. To handle this in xselect I set the dmodekey for HXD to DETNAM and then have WELL_PIN and WELL_GSO as the modes. The prelaunch xselect.mdb rebinned output spectra. I removed this since the example RMFs do not require it.

There was an error in xsel_read.f which implicitly assumed that dmodekey was the same for all instruments in a mission. This is fixed but will require users to patch. Using only the release version of xselect the user will have to do a set phaname to PI_PIN or PI_SLOW as appropriate.

Also did some tidying up of the (t)xselect.key file which contained some incorrect parameter names leading to warning messages when using the lparm command.

Friday, September 09, 2005

More changes to xselect.mdb for Suzaku XIS. Corrected name and location of common HK file, changed autobinning to 8 for image and wmap, changed save spectrum behaviour so no binning is performed but only channels 0 to 4095 are output - this matches AO1 response matrix. Set chip column to SEGMENT to allow sisclean command to work using updated cleansis tool. Note thatthis also means that ccol will be set to SEGMENT on running extractor. I don't think this will have any effect but watch out for any problems. Changed Suzaku XIS instrument names from XIS-# to XIS# since the latter is what the INSTRUMENT keyword is set to in the event files.Changed lststr so make cat finds only the event files in the xis directory.

Created web page on using xselect for Suzaku. Included links to new versions of cleansis.f and xselect.mdb.

Dupuis & Woan present a method of searching for GW signals from known radio pulsars.

Qin et al. argue that the flat cores in dark matter haloes could be explained if there are 3 large extra dimensions of nm size.

Donahue et al. present Chandra observations of two cool core clusters with no evidence for a central AGN. They find no cavities, no central temperature gradients, and a higher entropy than other cores. One explanation is a major heating event ~1 Gyr ago.

Added a line to xselect.mdb to set gcol to GRADE so that the filter grade option can be used on XIS event files. This also requires the TLMIN/MAX for the GRADE column to be set in the input files which is not the case yet.

Fujimoto-san pointed out that extractor doesn't work correctly if the input event file has no GTIs and there are selection GTIs set (eg from select hk). The resulting event file has no events but does have GTIs and hence non-zero exposure time. This is fixed in extractor v4.56.

Chluba & Sunyaev point out that induced emission of the softer photon slightly increases the two-photon decay rate of the 2s level of hydrogen. This is important for calculations of cosmological reionization and changes CMB temperature and polarization anisotropies.

For Hera Bill needs extractor to behave correctly with region files created on a Windows machine. They have LF and CR at the end of each line so regions.f was modified to strip off any extraneous CR. This shouldn't change any other behaviour.